On Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:30:46 +0000, Chris Torek wrote: >>I'm not sure what you mean by "full 16-bit Unicode string"? Isn't >>unicode inherently 32 bit? > > Well, not exactly. As I understand it, Python is normally built > with a 16-bit "unicode character" type though It's normally 32-bit on platforms where wchar_t is 32-bit (e.g. Linux).